ISSN: 2334-234X (Print), 2334-2358 (Online) Copyright © The Author(s). All Rights Reserved.
Published by American Research Institute for Policy Development DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v3n2a7 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.15640/ijll.v3n2a7
Dyslexia in the Arab World
Talal Musaed Al-ghizzi
1Abstract
This article presents an overview of dyslexia, its types and their definitions, and the complicated issues it has raised in the Arab World.
Keywords: Dyslexia, Developmental Dyslexia, Trauma Dyslexia, Alexic, Dyseidetic, and Dysphonetic.
Dyslexia has been a subject of debate for many decades and still continues to be a contentious topic.
Historically, the debate, in a form of argument rather than research, was between educationalists, some of whom questioned even the existence of the condition. Since those early days, however, there have been some insightful studies, which gradually accumulated evidence enough to convince even the most hardened skeptic. Although those research papers have classified different types of dyslexia and offered definitions, there are still some unresolved issues with respect to categorizing those types and on reaching an international agreement as to one definition. For example, according to Dyslexia (2003) there are only two major types: “Developmental” – “caused by biological anomalies, usually genetic, in the brain at various levels (i.e., morphological or syntactic) from prenatal through childhood development”, and “acquired”, which is “caused by brain trauma that may occur pre-natally or later”, resulting in
“behavioral characteristics” similar to the former type. Also, specialists have proposed different subcategories within the first type of dyslexia, three of which are listed in Dyslexia (2003). For Boder (1973), developmental dyslexia have three various subcategories. One is dysphonetic, which is defined as disabled readers who are ableto read both exception words and regular words, which they know by sight, but areunable to sound out non words and unknown words. Two is dyseidetic, which indicates dyslexics who are capable of phonologically decoding non words and regular words by sounding them out slowly; yet, the sight reading of vocabulary was small for them, and they will experience a great difficulty in reading exception words. Three is Alexic/mixed dyseidetic and dysphonetic, which is the most severe type and in which participants are deficient in both phonological decoding and sight reading.
On the other hand, Medicin Net. Com (2012) lists only three kinds of dyslexia. First, “Trauma dyslexia”, which usually occurs after “some form of brain trauma or injury to the area of the brain that controls reading and writing”. Second, “primary”, which is defined as being genetically inherited and interpreted as a dysfunction of left side of the brain (i.e., cerebral cortex) and does not change with age. Third, is “secondary/developmental”, believed to occur more in boys than girls and to be caused by “hormonal development during the early stages of fetal development”. This type lessens as the child matures.
With regards to dyslexia definitions, as mentioned before, there is no international agreement on one specific definition. The reasons for this are not only that there are many various “forms” (Lawrence, 2009, p. 1), “causes, and effects” which may be “unique to each individual” (Murphy, 2004, p. 3) and that a definition might be based on one or groups of dyslexics, but also that there are still some disputes surrounding the neurological origin of dyslexia. In other words, the “neurological factors associated with dyslexia have yet to be satisfactory established” (Lawrence, 2009, p. 1).
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